Kenji has been involved in the Occupy Oakland movement for a while now. It was he who produced the meme-ing postcards about the central Oakland square, called Frank Ogawa Plaza, which Occupy Oakland renamed to "Oscar Grant Plaza" after the young man who was shot by a policeman while facedown on the ground, causing protests and riots in January 2009. His postcards pointed out that Frank Ogawa, a legislator, was also interned during WWII, and his being deposed from his post by Oscar Grant wasn't necessarily an example of historical justice.

Kenji's also producing a series of images, which you can see on his Facebook design page, relating more directly to the Occupy movement.

But you know me: it's the politically motivated toponymy that really gets my juices flowing. I know from experience to expect from Kenji this quality of political/cultural critique in the form of innovative art projects. But it's how OWS is getting the creative juices gushing all over the place that really tells me this movement has legs. I think urban toponymy and memorialization -- and especially the discussions that surround them -- are markers of a healthy, active, living polity. That is, a polity composed of engaged citizens, who are engaged with their environment in the broadest sense of the word: geographical, ecological, political, and cultural.

Kenji's map has also made clear to me something I hadn't thought of before: that OWS is a political movement that takes metonymy -- basically a system of geographical metaphors -- at utterly face value. Wall St -- the concept, as opposed to "Main Street" -- is the center of power. "Wall Street" the center of power is inaccessible to them. So protesters made the geographical location into a reverse metonym for "Wall Street" the banking industry, and occupied it. They can't access the center of power, so they occupy its physical symbol. This is why the locations of the various occupations are so important to both sides. And why a physical occupation is so important to the movement at this stage.

It's important for more than just this reason, of course. The failure of broad-based political movements over the past decade or so, and especially during wartime; the transferance of our base of cultural communications to the internet, and the attempt to organize people politically on the internet -- an only moderate success; and the accession of a new generation of young adults who have never engaged in political movements, have all made face-to-face, real-time, real-place politics exciting and essential.

And in the wake of the worst wave of defaults, repos, and evictions since the Great Depression, moral ownership of place is profoundly emotional. I haven't seen anyone considering this (although I'm sure many have) but for the first time since the colonization of North America, we have a generation reaching adulthood with a seriously questionable prospect of land ownership. In the same way that you see homeless people walking slowly across busy streets, forcing traffic to slow and stop for them, OWS is forcing a momentary ownership of public space by people who mostly don't own space.

Friday, July 22, 2011

Somebody took the Sanborn insurance atlas of San Francisco from 1905 (before the earthquake and fire) and is mapping it, page by page, onto a contemporary map of the city. It's a big job so they need help. And yes, you can help, too, by going to the website and looking up intersections, then orienting and sizing each page to match map to map.

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

cool looking, but illegibly small and incomprehensibly presented. The explanation, which should have been voice-overed, at least, is that this is a mapping of the celestial bodies the Hubble telescope has documented. But it's so small, it's hard to really see what's going on.

Monday, July 27, 2009

well, I really haven't checked in on the NASA Mars missions sites in a while (something like three years.) Part of the problem is that the massive amounts of data the rovers are collecting (yes! they're still active!) take a while to sort through, and even then, the globally significant implications (Yes! there was water on Mars! Yes! There was rainfall! Yes! There's still localized magnetic fields on Mars!) are few and far between. And slow in coming.

Of course, my main, perhaps my only, interest in Mars is for my nobble (seven years and counting I've been working on that thing.) So I'm looking for very specific information, and I get bored and wander away fast if I don't get it.

So I've been missing this sort of coolness (see above.)

Anyhoo, I just talked about this with someone a few days ago. Perspectives on what Mars looks like have improved enormously with the rover missions and the reconnaisance orbiter missions. Before then, all you had was basically a satellite view, and a dog's eye view from the previous rover. The dog's eye view of a dog with a very short leash.

Neither of these perspectives is a human one. Our elevation from the ground, or our shape or wiring, is such that we don't look down, or feel a closeness to the dirt and rocks under our feet. We're always stretching up and up to get a higher view. And the first thing we do in terra incognita is to go find a hill or promontory and get on top of it, so we can see around better. The human perspective is one of constantly changing perspective, five feet off the ground, but off an extremely variable and quick-changing ground. The human perspective is the one that fills the gap between the dog's eye view and the satellite view.

The current rovers are much taller (man's eye view) and can go much farther, and have lasted much longer. So there have been many opportunities to change that perspective. And the reconnaisance orbiter has come far lower into the Martian atmosphere than intended, and of course far lower than any previous orbiters have done. So much so that the orbiter's images have been almost at fighter-jet-eye-view. That's close to the range of human perspective.

But. There's still a gap between the rover's perspective and the orbiter's perspective. They're filling that gap with clever science and CGI. But the CGI isn't Pixar enough (even Pixar isn't Pixar enough) to read as "realistically" as a photograph. Nor should it. So the human perspective on Mars is still missing.

The end of the video above demonstrates exactly what I mean. (Starting at about 3:30.)

Monday, July 20, 2009

okay, our YouTube map animations have to take a turn for the interesting and meaningful or I'm gonna lose my shit (read: interest.)

This one above is part of a talk by some Canadian dude about who knows what. The data presented here are interesting, though. The first part is simply oil production between 1965 and 2005. The second one is oil production AND consumption. And if you look at the US, those Gil-Scott Heron lyrics (from 1984) start running through my head.

What has happened is that in the last 20 years, America has changed from a producer to a consumer. And all consumers know that when the producer names the tune...the consumer has got to dance. That's the way it is. We used to be a producer – very inflexible at that, and now we are consumers and finding it difficult to understand. Natural resources and minerals will change your world. The Arabs used to be in the 3rd World. They have bought the 2nd World and put a firm down payment on the 1st one. Controlling your resources will control your world. This country has been surprised by the way the world looks now.

Yes indeedy, it has. We should be seeing animated maps like this on the nightly news. The government should be reporting our resource usage to us like a department at a staff meeting: "Today's metrics are ..."

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.
-- George Orwell

Geography and space are always gendered, always raced, always economical and always sexual. The textures that bind them together are daily re-written through a word, a gaze, a gesture.
-- Irit Rogoff